„Art of living. This is my motto. Not to be nasty but to know how to live. And this contains everything.“
Eva Kalinová was born in 1913 in Místek in the family of the textile factory owner Oskar Landsberger. Both, father and mother, were Jews, but they were highly assimilated, thus they didn't observe religious laws much and celebrated Christian holidays. Because of the Great Depression father's textile factory went bankrupt and moreover father died soon, so Eva Kalinová begun to work in Místek and then in Prague. At the end of the thirties because of rise of the Nazism, she started to be conscious of her Jewish origin more. After the Nazi occupation and foundation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, she and her husband managed to escape illegally via Vienna, Danube and the Black and the Mediterranean Sea to Palestine. They spent few days in British immigrant camp and then they worked in Palestine. After the outbreak of the World War II, they moved to France and Great Britain. She begun to work there in a nursery, got divorced and married a Czech soldier, Otto Kürschner. The family changed their name to Kalina later. Most members of the Landsberger's family were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. After the war, Otto Kalina started to work at Ministry of Commerce and in ceramics company. In February 1948, Mrs. Kalinová and her husband were both in England, but despite the coup d´etat they returned home and Otto Kalina was sent as commercial counsellor to Moscow. Eva Kalinová arrived there later, but because of inapropriate behaviour in Soviet Union, they had to go back to Czechoslovakia after a few months. In 1953, Otto Kalina was imprisoned for nine months for political reasons and Eva Kalinová had to look after her three children alone. Thanks to her friends, she got work at several secretaries of Charles University and at Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Finally, she started to translate scientific texts from Czech to English. Although she was with the whole family in Bulgaria during the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, all of them decided to return to Czechoslovakia. Eva Kalinová managed to survive the era of communism thanks to her intensive translating, disengaging from politics and thanks to focusing on human relations.
